Misadventures in grad school, running, and life

Month: December 2015

Luna has been a member of the family for some time now and we’ve watched her body and personality grow! So, we figured it may be fun to do a little insight/flashback into her life 🙂

First, we got her when she was ~8 weeks old. She hardly ate anything for days. Treats included! We were pretty worried about it to be honest. She already loved meeting new people and making new dog friends (didn’t matter what size)

This is from the day we got her! She liked to hide from Indy in Steve’s arms which is just as cute as it sounds 🙂

We quickly learned that she had no shame

at all

But she made up for it with cute and tons. of. energy.

Also she actually started eating! Granted, it was Indy’s adult dog food, but ya know you take what you can get. We also discovered that she is one of the few dogs who does not get completely terrified of the vet. To be fair, our comparison dog literally releases her anal glands at the vet so the bar was set pretty low. (Sorry, TMI)

Anyways, we expected her to get a quite a bit bigger than she actually did…. but we love her anyways.

She was terrified of car rides for the longest time! It only recently clicked that car = park = fun

As her confidence grew, so did her rebellious streak. It’s a good thing Steve and I are stubborn a-holes because she is crazy stubborn! Seriously, she WILL NOT take a bath and WILL NOT go outside when it’s raining. It’s hilarious actually.

We also learned that we may have accidentally adopted a cat….

Her bed of choice is the top of furniture.

She also resembles a bat…

So we have a cat-bat-dog. With the personality to match!

Here she is sleeping on the ONLY bed she has not destroyed….she worked on this one this morning,

BTW, we got this bed yesterday and she has pretty strong indications of separation anxiety. Even though we crate-trained her, Steve’s surgery had him holed up all day erry day for most of her starting months with us. So she never got truly left alone.

Now we are working on this separation anxiety, teaching her to army crawl, and going over the basics of fetch!

Ok I forgot how the rest of the story goes, but maybe I’ll finish it over winter break 🙂

Anyways, as aforementioned, finals are over! Undergrads are leaving the campus in droves and parking now exists! This post is just going to be all over the place and that’s cause I haven’t taken a whole lot of pictures lately

Steve informed me that he has never experienced having a real Christmas tree for the holidays! So obviously we have to go all out this year and leave our artificial tree in storage. We went to a local Xmas tree farm so we could cut our own tree! In hindsight, this was not the best idea for several reasons 1) we have 2 psychotic dogs 2) Steve is sill recovering from knee surgery 3) small children and psychotic dogs don’t mix

We managed to find Charlie Brown’s tree!

And while we seriously thought about it, I wanted Steve to have the full tree experience so we chose this guy instead

Note: We grossly underestimated the size of our apartment and picked a very fat tree. We can no longer access our office

In the research world I managed to make myself super confused, like usual, and the process of trying to un-confuse myself actually made the situation worse.

Having 4 different math-ing programs open for one problem is totally normal right?? I did eventually figure it out, but I still get kinda confused and am hoping no one asks me about how I found the solution cause I still don’t know.

In the dog world, Luna is getting bigger! And by that we mean she’s still a tiny 20 lbs. She is reaching the stage where she can still slip through the rails on our deck to escape into the wilderness, but her return trip has taken a sudden turn for the worse

*The indignant look on her face kills me 😀

I shall return soon with more of The Night Before Chistmas-University Edition

So yeah, it’s almost a month after Thanksgiving…buuuut imma finish what I started!

Friday night was date night at the Biltmore! For those who don’t know, the Biltmore house is the largest home in the US and was built by the Vanderbilts. It was considered very a advanced home, architecturally and technologically, for its time.

There is also a vineyard on the property and they offer a free wine tasting of all of their 22 wines! Steve and I restrained ourselves to about 7 each since we wanted to stumble actually walk around the house later.

We also had dinner at the pub on the grounds which was delicious. We may or may not have polished off a bottle of vino…..who actually keeps track of these things? And we watched a vivid and beautiful sunset that I did my best to take a picture of, but this does not do it justice…the colors were so intense!

We were able to walk through the house to see the holiday decorations at night which was pretty neat. They don’t allow photography inside the house but I like to live on the wild side and break the rules #thuglife

We felt super fancy with all the live music and ornate decor….although we reverted back to ourselves when we got back outside

The following day we had nothing planned!

It was AWESOME

We decided to head into town and check out some of the local food and beer scene and wound up at Asheville Brewing

Basically, it was a giant throwback to the 90s and everything Steve loves and he was so happy! We sat in the Star Wars section and had lunch with some questionable individuals…

And pizza!!

We headed over to the pinball museum after drinking beer and eating pizza (the usual college thing) because we are both pretty big fans of pinball and word on the street is you can play unlimited pinball and retro arcade games there for $13

That night we had our last fire 🙂

And Steve was bound and determined to create the perfect smore, at this point I was passed out in bed, but he stole my camera and had a photo shoot with some marshmallows

Things have been a little quiet over here lately, but don’t worry we are definitely still up to random shenanigans!

Steve and I retreated to a cabin outside of Asheville (on the top of a mountain) for the Thanksgiving holiday this year. While we love our families, we realized that we have never really taken a vacation that didn’t involve visiting someone! Thus, a total retreat with just us and the dogs was exactly what the doctor ordered after this difficult semester.

We decided to drive up on Wednesday morning and it was only a 4 hr drive from Raleigh (it was so different having a short trip for once!). Once we made it to Weaverville (just 10 min north of Asheville) we left my car at the bottom of the mountain and the owners were kind enough to drive us up the mountain to our cabin. They definitely were not kidding about needing 4 wheel drive!

The view was worth all the trouble though. It was simply breathtaking. We spent SO much time just looking. Not doing anything, just looking out and feeling peaceful 🙂

The inside of the cabin was pretty small, we had a bedroom, bathroom, and 1/2 a kitchen, and you could walk outside to get to the living room with a TV and couches. It couldn’t have been more perfect for us! We spent most of our time outside with the dogs and we made some pretty incredible meals using only an electric burner and a grill. Including our Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving Turkey Burger!

This was so good, so imma go ahead and share the recipe:

Thanksgiving in a Burger

Ingredients:

1 lb ground turkey

0.25 cup chopped onion

0.25 cup dried cranberries

2-3 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped

~0.5 cup bread crumbs (add enough so turkey is not super sticky)

2-3 sprigs fresh sage, chopped

brie

turkey gravy (homemade would be awesome but we just used the cheap instant stuff)

buns

Directions:

It’s always a good idea to preheat your grill before you start so go ahead and do that, or oven or skillet or sidewalk, whatever you’re gonna use to cook the burgers.

Next, mix the turkey, onion, cranberries, bread crumbs, rosemary, and sage together in a bowl. Salt and pepper to taste and form into patties. Cook the patties until the burgers are cooked through then add a few slices (or a lot of slices because cheese) of brie and let it melt.

While the brie is melting, pour the instant gravy into the pot and add half of the water called for on the package. Cook according to package instructions and let thicken. <- This is gonna seem super salty, but it balances nicely with the whole burger deal.

BURGERS ASSEMBLE!! (at this point you can either attempt to call the Avengers or just assemble the burgers)

These were awesome and we regretfully only made 4. All of which were eaten within several hours of each other.

The dogs tried their best to get some, but were denied turkey this year

-Look at those bat ears!!!

After stuffing ourselves we went back to the usual activities and sat, drank wine, and looked at mountains…